Tearing Down the Nanny State or Everybody is a Freeloader

Today I read an article* on the evils of the Nanny State by a Mr David Warren of the Ottawa Citizen newspaper. What was interesting in the piece was how he chose two examples of why the Nanny State is bad, and then quickly jumped to why the Tea Party was the only solution to our ills.

His methodology was almost perfect. First give a couple of examples that many people could and would understand and then blame the problem on freeloaders, human rights, and spending out of control at the expense of the rich. End up with a solution-small government focused solely on national defense and domestic law and order, and provide the relevant political movement- the Tea Party.

Small governement is the main refrain of the Tea Party songbook. It's a catchy tune, reducing everything down to simplistic answers to very complex problems.

But back to his examples.

The first is the refusal of the French to recognise that the current retirement age, 60, is not sustainable. Retirement at 60 was introduced at a time that the French government could afford it and was a ploy to help get younger workers into employment.

Retirement at 60 is not viable currently although if you were 60 and were expecting to retire and were now told you had to work another 2 years you might be a bit upset. Regardless, this was an easy target.

The second example was the attempt to make 800 London Underground workers redundant and the ensuing strikes by the unions in support of their fellow workers. Mr Warren only points out the chaos caused by the strikes-and it was chaotic and damaging-but spends no time explaining the redundancies other than to a.)blame the Nanny State for their initial employment and b.)bring in the unions as the root of all evil.

Now my favorite part. He splits the world into "the party of Entitlement" and the "the Party of Tax-Cuts". He goes so far as to admit that the tax-cut party are the rich; he conveniently omits that the entitlement guys are the poor preferring to castigate them as freeloaders-people who think they deserve a pension,and then slandering the majority by accusing them of never having paid into social security.

From there he hones in on the public's basic fears explaining how the government is cutting the police, the military and essential public services, because of all the other non-essential "entitlement" spending.

It is an almost perfect piece of demagoguery-it even warns of the evils of demagoguery, from the left.

I think I am beginning to understand how it is that some 50% of the American voting public continually votes for a party that does not have its interest at heart.

*http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/09/10/the_nanny_state_has_blown_the_bank_107091.html